General Motors said Tuesday it is recalling 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs in North America because the carpet could catch fire after a crash where a front seat belt pretensioner deploys.

The U.S. automaker said the recall covers various 2017 through 2023 model year Chevrolet Bolt EV vehicles due to rare instances of front seatbelt pretensioner exhaust gases coming in contact with floor carpeting fibers, after a vehicle crash, which could cause a fire.

About 120,000 U.S. vehicles and 20,000 Canadian vehicles are impacted by the recall.

From the article: Researchers from Mount Sinai have shown that a therapy using talquetamab, an off-the-shelf drug known as a bispecific antibody, can be enlisted to kill multiple myeloma cells (a type of white blood cell) that can build up in the bone marrow and form tumors in bones. The therapy destroys cancerous cells in 3 out of 4 patients, and side effects, while common, are not severe.

The drug was tested in both phase 1 and phase 2 trials — the phase 1 trial established the safety and established a recommendation of two doses, whereas the phase 2 trials tested the effectiveness on 143 patients treated on a weekly dose and 145 patients treated at a higher biweekly dose.

The overall response rate was 73%, said Ajai Chari, study author. Around a third of the patients in both groups had a complete response — there was no detection of any myeloma-specific markers after the treatment. Almost 60% had a “very good partial response”, which means that the cancer was substantially reduced but not to zero.

“This means that almost three-quarters of these patients are looking at a new lease on life,” said Chari. “Talquetamab induced a substantial response among patients with heavily pretreated, relapsed, or refractory multiple myeloma, the second-most-common blood cancer. It is the first bispecific agent targeting the protein GPRC5d in multiple myeloma patients.”

The results are particularly exciting because patients who receive standard therapy for myeloma have a very high rate of relapse — and the more they relapse, the worse the prognosis becomes. But the success of talquematab was even seen in participants who were resistant to all other approved therapies, which makes this approach particularly promising. The researchers described this strategy as “bringing your army right to the enemy.”

From the article: Professor Yan Zhuge, an engineering expert at the University of South Australia, is trialing a novel solution. It involves no humans or bots but self-healing concrete.

The world-first project, if successful, could be a significant help. It could prevent 17,000 kilometers of sewer pipes in Australia from cracking in the future without any intervention by humans, helping to save $1.4 billion in annual maintenance costs, as per a release.

"We are confident this novel self-healing concrete based on advance composite technology will address issues of sewer pipe corrosion and sludge disposal in one hit," Zhuge said in a statement.

The microcapsules will release healing agents when pH value changes

Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars are required to treat sewage pipes buckling under internal pressure, temperature fluctuations, and corrosive acid. Self-healing concrete, in the form of microcapsules filled with water treatment sludge, could change everything.

"Sludge waste shows promise to mitigate microbial corrosion in concrete sewer pipes because it works as a healing agent to resist acid corrosion and heal the cracks," Zhuge said.

According to the release, researchers will develop microcapsules with a pH-sensitive shell and a healing agent core with alum sludge, a by-product of wastewater treatment plants, and calcium hydroxide powder. This combination will be resistant to microbially induced corrosion.

From the article: Plastics are incredibly useful but dangerously problematic. Our planet is drowning in unrecycled plastic, and we need better ways to recycle to help it recover.

In theory, all plastics can be recycled, but the sad reality is that the vast majority never get recycled. This is due to the cost of collecting, cleaning, and sorting the thousands of types of plastics before they begin their recycling processes. Even though global recycling rates are barely at 5%, current projections show that global plastic waste is on course to triple by 2060. Polyvinyl chloride, commonly known as PVC, is the third most-produced plastic in the world and one of the most difficult to recycle. The high versatility of PVC has led to its use in a wide variety of products, including hospital equipment, plumbing, electrical wiring, packaging, and even clothing. Unfortunately, less than a quarter of 1% of post-consumer PVC is currently recycled.

Thanks to a research team at the University of Michigan, there is now a promising new technique to recycle PVC.

The team at the University of Michigan led by Danielle Fagnani and Anne McNeil has discovered a way to use a component of the PVC that previously made recycling incredibly difficult by improving the method's efficiency. The components that make PVC so difficult to recycle are the various additives it can contain called plasticizers. Plasticizers are compounds added in the production process to make PVC more flexible and durable. Fagnani stated in a recent interview, “PVC usually contains a lot of plasticizers, which contaminate everything in the recycling stream and are usually very toxic. It also releases hydrochloric acid really rapidly with some heat.”

The most detrimental of the plasticizers are phthalates, which are highly toxic to humans and known to negatively impact our hormonal systems. When plastics are recycled by adding heat, the phthalates leach out. The method discovered by Fagnani and her team uses the toxic phthalates to decrease the energy input required and make the process more efficient overall.

From the article: A new study published in the Journal of Adolescence tested an 8-week mindfulness training program among a group of adolescent and adult females. The results revealed that both teens and adults showed improvements in reorienting their attention following mindfulness training.

Adolescence is a period of continued brain development, which includes improvements in cognitive control and emotion regulation. It has been proposed that mindfulness training (MT) might help adolescents cultivate these skills. But while MT has been found to improve cognitive control and emotion regulation in adult samples, its effectiveness among youth is less clear.

Since adolescence is marked by heightened emotional reactivity, mindfulness training might be particularly beneficial for this age group. On the other hand, with fewer attentional resources than adults, adolescents might not be fully capable of benefiting from MT. Study author Iroise Dumontheil and her team set out to explore differences in how adults and adolescents would respond to the same mindfulness training.

“The study started in 2012. At the time, there was quite a lot of hype about mindfulness,” explained Dumontheil, a professor at the University of London and author of “Educational Neuroscience: Development Across the Life Span.”

“It was being implemented in schools but there was very little research evidence of its potential impact on children and adolescents. We were interested in better understanding the specific mechanisms through which mindfulness meditation training may influence cognition, compared to a closely match condition, which was relaxation training in our study.”